SPC FRAMEWORK · REFLECTION
When Companies Fail Financially Because They Lack Understanding of the Seed Level.
Can a business grow other businesses and still not grow itself? Can a team share the same values and still drift somewhere nobody chose?
I came home from a business event recently with both questions in my notebook.
The guest speaker was the founder of a consultancy that helps companies grow: management processes, design, product design, customer journey. Exactly the kind of work that promises clarity to others.
What she said
She was honest, and I respected that. She said, more than once, that the company does not make money. That they do it for love. That only after five years did she start paying herself what she used to earn in corporate jobs. What keeps the team going, she said, is the big projects and the challenge, not exactly the return.
At one point she mentioned that she had left a large company because she did not agree with its culture. I was curious, so I asked: when you opened your own company, how did you build its culture?
Her answer: it happened naturally. Not by the book, not planned. Through example, through being transparent and honest. And then she added something that stayed with me. Sometimes that culture turns into something unexpected, and she finds herself arguing with her own team that they also need to make a profit, and that the strategy has to change.
“Values are the soil. They are not the seed.”
The missing seed
I did not leave with a judgment. I left with a mirror.
In the SPC System, the second stage is the Seed Level 🥜: the foundational idea, planted with intention. Values like honesty and transparency are beautiful soil. But soil does not decide what grows in it. A seed does.
When the seed is never written down, three things tend to happen:
- Passion becomes the only fuel. And passion is generous until the month it is not.
- Culture grows by accident. Good people, good intentions, and still a direction nobody chose.
- Profit becomes an argument instead of a design. If it was never part of the seed, every conversation about money feels like a betrayal of the love.
Working for love can be the right strategy. In philanthropy, it often is. But then love is the seed, chosen and written down, and everyone knows what they are growing. The problem is not love. The problem is a business that never planted its seed, and then wonders why the money does not grow.
I have been there. Not with a consultancy, but with my own life.
Accelerate, or go deeper first?
At the same event I met another woman, a mentor who described herself, laughing, as a people accelerator. I told her I prefer to go deeper before accelerating. There was a time in my life when I accelerated a lot. I had external success, and depression. Since then I correct the starting point first.
She agreed right away: we always have to treat what is deeper.
That is the whole lesson of the event for me. Speed multiplies whatever is already underneath. A clear seed makes acceleration work. A missing one makes it hurt.
Loose ends
One more thing stayed with me. At the end, the organizer told me she would send an email about the next events, with an invitation to become a member. I am still waiting.
It is a small thing, and I don’t say it to point a finger. But it made me wonder what the event was really for, from their side. A room full of people who want to grow, and then nothing. It reminded me how often events like this are one gear in a bigger machine, with loose ends nobody owns.
A follow-up is not a detail. It is the seed showing up in practice. When you know what you are growing, you know who to call the next day.
Three questions for your own seed
1. Can you write in one sentence what your work is growing, and for whom?
2. Is the return you need part of that sentence, or something you argue about later?
3. If your culture keeps growing the way it is now, where will it be in a year? Did you choose that place?
If any answer made you pause, that pause is useful. It is where the seed starts.
Start here → The Free Assessment takes about three minutes and shows you which stage you are in right now, and your next step.
With clarity and intention,
Paula
